Throughout the fin de siecle, medical research institutes increasingly hallmarked “modernity” across industrialized nations and their colonies.1 While the reification of these “veritable laboratory Xanadus” as insular centres for pure science has recently been questioned,2 the absence of such facilities in Australia prior to the First World War had enduring ramifications for public, political and professional perceptions of scientific medicine. Indeed, the handful of establishments that arose between 1910 and 1939 merit attention precisely because they so patently embodied local projections of “medical research”. Underpinned by a pragmatic progressivism, yet constrained by fealty to empire, the enterprises emerging during this period were predominantly British in flavour and modern in their ideals. In both form and function, however, the early Australian research institutes were never simple facsimiles of international models. Instead, each was shaped by local accommodations in defining its mission and value within a culture often indifferent—and not infrequently hostile—to basic research. Indeed, each of these ventures constituted an experiment, or rather a contingent series of experiments, to triangulate itself within a favourable medical, social and political space. Yet the development of the early Antipodean research institutes resists a teleological reading. Most subsisted with fewer than ten to fifteen staff, and many stagnated or failed outright. In the absence of a stable funding base or a groundswell of investigators determined to make a career of research, these enterprises could have reverted to the status of little more than diagnostic laboratories. In responding to the challenge laid down by Steve Sturdy and Roger Cooter a decade ago,3 this article explicates the circumstances and strategies by which laboratory-based science negotiated a place in Australian medicine. My focus lies primarily with the most successful establishment, Melbourne’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Research in Pathology and Medicine, directed between 1923 and 1944 by Charles Kellaway (1889–1952). I argue that Kellaway’s willingness to experiment with the form, function and funding of the Hall Institute not only ensured its own survival, but created exemplars and infrastructure that fostered medical research as a locally viable career.